Do you dread Valentine’s Day, with the pictures of the happy couples who will surprise each other with thoughtful gifts, give or receive flowers, have a romantic dinner date, and spend the day in joy because they are receiving love from their special someone? Who did you remember on Valentine’s Day, the ex-partner, old heartache, or the empty seat at your dinner table? Valentine’s Day is a celebration of emotional love, which is different from the energy of love. This is the difference between ‘doing’ love and ‘being’ love. We are always in the being-ness of love, even if we do not have an example of emotional love (the ‘doing’ love) present in our life.

From a mind/heart level, we yearn for the expression and emotion of love because we’re physical beings. If we can’t see, hear, feel, taste, and touch something, it doesn’t exist for us in our physical world. But emotional love is created from energetic love, and we always get it backwards. We think that if we have a partner to show us love, then we have love. But the only way we can create that partnership in its highest aspects is to be in the energy of love, which can then manifest as physical expression of emotional love.

Any time we make a love connection through our emotions, without first being in the energy of love, we invite healing. The last ten to fifteen years (or longer) have been hard on our romantic lives. Relationships either ended or disappeared. It feels like being on our spiritual path plastered a big ‘Out of Service’ sign on our forehead, letting everyone around us know we were not available for relationships. And even if we tried, the relationships we attracted were always healing or hard, brought up ours or someone else’s (or both) deepest issues that, once they were over, made us happy for the peace and solitude of single life. Any time we seek love through the emotions first, we connect with love that heals our emotional wounds instead of love that expands our love energy.

By now we’re asking ourselves if we will ever have a committed love relationship and the answer is ‘yes’, we will. To answer the question of ‘when’, which is what we always want to know, it will happen at the right and perfect time. I know that sounds like a standard answer but we don’t want just ‘any’ partner, we want the right one. And we have to be aligned with and in integrity with the kind of love we want. Think about the kind of love you want to receive from someone and ask yourself if you are giving that exact measure of love to yourself right now. If you are not, you cannot expect to receive it from someone else. Everyone is our mirror and that includes a mirror of love.

Our new love paradigms, which set the foundation for all of our relationships, must be equal in giving and in receiving. We can no longer be the giver and hope that eventually, someone will be healed enough to love us in return. Or that we will love them enough that they will love us out of their gratitude and appreciation. We need to go into relationships as healed and whole, in order to also attract healed and whole partners. All of the work around love and relationships that we have done does not get confirmed when we can practice it on someone else, it begins with us. Can we love ourselves first, so we can create that level of love in our lives? That’s the first step to creating love in our lives. Everyone reflects our self love back to us and if we don’t have any, that mirror will be blank.

And the kind of relationship we manifest will also reflect our boundaries, our level of frequency and vibration, and mirror our exact level of self love back to us. Just as you don’t see someone with different hair and eye color when you look at yourself in a mirror, you aren’t going to connect with someone who is more loving towards you than you are towards yourself. It all begins with us, and we have said that we want to be more powerful and connected, and this is the integrity that this level of connection requires. Now, can we believe that relationship we want is moving towards us and continue to believe that even if we do not see immediate results? That’s where our faith and trust get a workout.

Set your intention for a relationship that is a sharing of energy, beliefs, thoughts and emotions, where both partners are grounded in the energy of love. Love energy is a powerful force that, when shared from a point of our empowered being, will bless us with the relationships (and love in action) that we want. When we love ourselves, which means fully accepting ourselves and knowing ourselves as perfect and already loved, and begin from the point, we are moving energy to manifest as love in the physical world.

Your self love expands the energy of love in the world, and that’s a great reason to begin loving yourself as much as you want someone to love you. And when you do that, you also send out an invitation to receive love that the right and best person will notice and respond to with exactly the amount and type of love you want.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Jennifer Hoffman. All rights reserved. You may quote, translate, reprint or refer to this message if you mention the author name and include a working link to http://enlighteninglife.com